Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (49 page)

• The distinction is made even in religious art: Jesus and God are nearly always drawn giving blessings with their right hand, and the Devil is usually portrayed doing evil with his left hand.

Close encounters: 10% of Americans swear they’ve “been in the presence of a ghost.”

These pages were contributed by Larry Kelp, whose picture has been on the back cover since the first
Bathroom Reader.
He’s a music writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was Uncle John’s neighbor
.

I
WANT MY MTV!

In 1981 Robert Pittman, a 27-year-old vice president in charge of new programming at Warner-Amex, came up with an idea for Music Television, an all-music channel that would play almost nothing but rock videos. The gimmick: free programming—the videos would be supplied by record companies at no charge. “The explicit aim,” explains one critic, “was to deliver the notoriously difficult-to-reach 14 to 34 demographic segment to the record companies, beer manufacturers, and pimple cream makers.”

Based on that appeal, Pittman talked Warner into investing $30 million in the idea. Four years later, Warner-Amex sold MTV to Viacom for $550 million. In 1992 its estimated worth was $2 billion. Today it broadcasts in more than 50 different countries.

GETTING STARTED

• Pittman planned to call the channel TV-1, but immediately ran into a problem: “Our legal department found another business with that name. The best we could get was TV-M...and TV-M it was, until our head of music programming said, “Don’t you think MTV sounds a little better than TV-M?”

• The design for the logo was another fluke. “Originally,” Pittman recalls, “We thought MTV would be three equal-size letters like ABC, NBC and CBS. But...three ‘kids’ in a loft downtown, Manhattan Design, came up with the idea for a big M, with TV spray-painted over it. We just cut the paint drips off the TV, and that’s the logo. We paid about $1,000 for one of the decade’s best-known logos.”

• MTV originally planned to use astronaut Neil Armstrong’s words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” with its now-famous “Moon Man” station identification. “But a few days before we launched,” Pittman says, “an executive came flying into my office. We had just received a letter from Armstrong’s lawyer threatening to sue us if we used his client’s voice. We had no time and, worse, no money to redo this on-air ID. So we took his voice off and used the ID with just music. Not at all what we had envisioned, yet, fortunately, it worked fine.”

Long live the King: 13 countries around the world have issued Elvis Presley postage stamps.

MTV DATA

• MTV went on air at midnight, August 1, 1981. Its first video was the Buggies’ prophetic “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

• The average MTV viewer tunes in for 16 minutes at a time.

• MTV’s VJs have a short shelf life. Once they start looking old, they’re retired.

• Not all of the music channel’s fans are teenagers. One unusual audience: medical offices.
Prevention
magazine says MTV in the doctor’s office helps relieve women’s tension before medical exams.

• MTV reaches 75% of those households inhabited by people 18 to 34 years old and 85% of the households with one teenager.

• While many countries served by MTV Europe have local programming with their own VJs, most are in English, the global language of rock. In Holland, a Flemish language show was dropped because viewers complained that it wasn’t in English.

YO, MTV!

It took constant badgering by 25-year-old former intern Ted Demme (nephew of film director Jonathan) to get MTV to air a rap show, “Yo! MTV Raps,” in 1989. He argued that white suburban kids wanted rap. The execs gave him one shot at it. “Yo!” was aired on a Saturday. By Monday the ratings and calls were so impressive that “Yo!” got a daily slot, and quickly became MTV’s top-rated show.

UNPLUGGED

In 1990 MTV first aired “Unplugged,” which went against everything music videos had stood for. Instead of stars lip-synching to prerecorded tracks, “Unplugged” taped them live in front of a studio audience, and forced them to use acoustic instruments, making music and talent the focus. What could have been a gimmick turned into a trend when Paul McCartney released his “Unplugged” appearance as an album, and it became one of his bestselling albums. Two years later, Eric Clapton did the same, which made “Layla” a hit song all over again and earned him Grammy Awards as well as platinum records.

More than 50% of Americans believe in the devil; 1 in 10 say they’ve talked to him personally.

TV comments about everyday life. From Primetime Proverbs, by Jack Mingo and John Javna
.

ON AMBITION

“I’m tired of being an object of ridicule. I wanna be a figure of fear, respect, and SEX!”

—Radar O’Reilly,
M*A*S*H

ON AMERICA

George Jefferson:
“It’s the American dream come true. Ten years ago, I was this little guy with one store. And now look at me—”

Louise Jefferson:
“Now your’re the little guy with seven stores.”

—
The Jeffersons

ON THE ARTS

“You know, if Michelangelo had used me as a model, there’s no telling how far he could have gone.”

—Herman Munster,
The Munsters

ON DATING

“Randy, there are three reasons why I won’t go out with you: one, you’re obnoxious; two, you’re repulsive; and three, you haven’t asked me yet.”

—Julianne,
Van Dyke

ON MEN

“A good man doesn’t happen. They have to be created by us women. A guy is a lump like a doughnut. So, first you gotta get rid of all the stuff his mom did to him. And then you gotta get rid of all that macho crap that they pick up from the beer commercials. And then there’s my personal favorite, the male ego.”

—Roseanne,
Roseanne

ON COURAGE

“Wanna do something courageous? Come to my house and say to my mother-in-law, ‘You’re wrong, fatso!’”

—Buddy Sorrell,
The Dick Van Dyke Show

ON BANKERS

“Why do they call them tellers? They never tell you anything. They just ask questions. And why do they call it interest? It’s boring. And another thing—how come the Trust Department has all their pens chained to the table?”

—Coach Ernie Pantusso,
Cheers

Claim to fame: Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first city to fluoridate its water supply.

Some adventures with my favorite aunt. Answers are on p. 663
.

M
URDER AT THE BIG HOTEL

My Aunt Lenna loves puzzles. Not complicated ones—just the kind people call
brain teasers
. “I don’t like those puzzles where you have to be a genius at math,” she often says. “I want simple puzzles of logic.”

One day she was reading a mystery, and she began musing out loud: “It was a very large, fancy hotel. The hotel detective was making his rounds, walking in the hallway...when suddenly he heard a woman cry, ‘Please! Don’t shoot me, Steve!’ And a shot rang out!”

“Sounds original, Aunt Lenna.”

“Well now, hold on, Nephew. The detective ran as fast as he could to the room the shot came from, and pushed his way in. The body of a woman who’d been shot lay in a corner of the room; the gun that had been used to kill her was on the floor near her. On the opposite side of the room stood a postman, an accountant, and a lawyer. For a moment, the detective hesitated as he looked at them. Then he strode up to the postman and said—‘You’re under arrest for murder.’

“A little hasty, wasn’t he? Or was there some evidence you’re not mentioning?”

“He wasn’t hasty, and there was no other evidence...and the detective made the right choice.”

“Weil, how did he know?”

How did he?

Aunt Lenna likes word games, too. Some are real groaners. Like she once asked me, “What word is it that when you take away the whole, you still have some left?” Another time she asked, “Can you make one word out of the letters DRENOOW?”

Got the answers?

Owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.

Was Vicki Morgan murdered by her mentally disturbed housemate—or by her powerful enemies in the Republican establishment?

S
uspicious Death:
Vicki Morgan, model and longtime mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, one of the wealthiest men in America. (He was heir to the Bloomingdale department store fortune, and a member of Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet.)

How she died:
On July 7, 1983, Morgan was found dead in her apartment, beaten to death with a baseball bat. The man who shared her Studio City condo, Marvin Pancoast, confessed.

BACKGROUND

• Morgan was Bloomingdale’s mistress for twelve years—from 1970 to 1982, when Bloomingdale contracted terminal throat cancer. Once Alfred was hospitalized, his wife, Betsy, long furious about the affair, cut off Morgan’s income—which was reportedly between $10,000 and $18,000 a month.

• In response, Morgan decided to go public about the affair. She first tried to place her memoirs,
Alfred’s Mistress
, with the William Morris Agency. When that attempt fizzled—allegedly because of White House pressure—she filed a $10 million palimony suit against Bloomingdale in which she revealed all of Bloomingdale’s indiscretions, from his taste for kinky sex—she once described him as “a drooling sadist” with a fondness for bondage and beatings—to his loose talk about “secret and delicate matters such as campaign contributions for Mr. Reagan.”

• The case was thrown out, but the trial was an enormous embarrassment to Betsy Bloomingdale—Nancy Reagan’s close friend—as well as to Bloomingdale’s highly placed Republican cronies.

Not just for kids: Nintendo estimates that 42% of the people who use its games are over 18.

SUSPICIOUS FACTS

Marvin Pancoast

• Pancoast had a history of mental illness. (In fact, Morgan had met him four years earlier when they were both patients in a mental institution.) He had previously confessed to crimes he hadn’t committed. At one point he even confessed to the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson family.

• The room in which Morgan was killed was spattered with blood—but, according to John Austin, author of
Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries
, when Pancoast turned himself in, he did not have a spot of blood on him anywhere. No bloodstained clothes of his were ever found.

Kissing and Telling

• Morgan may have been more than just Bloomingdale’s mistress—Bloomingdale may have used her to gather dirt on top-level Republican officials. According to Austin, Bloomingdale had his Hollywood house wired with “state-of-the-art video cameras in every room and hidden behind false walls. Even the three johns were ‘wired’ behind two-way mirrors....Vicki and Pancoast would often ‘share’ a high ranking member of the [Reagan] Administration....Anyone who was important in the pre-Administration and the Administration of Ronald Reagan and who wanted
divertissement
called on Alfred, regardless of what his or her fetish might be.” And Bloomingdale allegedly got it all on tape.

• If the tapes existed, what happened to them? Five days after Morgan’s death, attorney Robert Steinberg held a press conference in Los Angeles announcing that he had received three videotapes showing “Bloomingdale and Miss Morgan engaging in group and sadomasochistic sex with top government officials.” The sex tapes, Steinberg asserted, could “bring down the Reagan government.” But when a court ordered Steinberg to turn them over to police, he suddenly declared that they had been stolen from a bag in his office during the press conference. The media denounced the whole thing as a hoax.

• Morgan’s apartment wasn’t sealed by the L.A. Police Department until more than 24 hours after the murder. According to author Anne Louise Bardach, “This is really a story of police negligence. People could just walk in and walk out. And they did. If there were any ‘sex tapes’ in the condo, then they could easily have disappeared during those 24 hours.”

McDonalds hired 45 Ph.D. scientists to help it develop “carrot sticks” in 1991.

• Morgan may have sensed that the end was near. The night before she was killed, according to her friend Gordon Basichis, “Vicki confided in me that she was afraid of being murdered. I have a feeling that someone with knowledge of the Bloomingdale ‘tapes’ had approached her, possibly through Pancoast, with a proposal for blackmail.”

POSSIBLE CONCLUSIONS

•
Pancoast killed her.
After all, he confessed and was sentenced in the case.

•
Someone in power had Morgan killed.
She could have been killed to silence her. If the videotapes did exist, they would have been severely damaging to the Reagan administration. Bloomingdale was a close personal friend of the president and an appointee to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

RECOMMENDED READING

•
Encyclopedia of American Scandal
, by George C. Kohn (Facts On File, 1989)

•
Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries
, by John Austin (Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1990)

TALES OF THE CIA

The ultimate in insider trading was described in Warren Hinkle and William Turner’s book
Deadly Secrets
: “When the White House gave the green light for the [Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961], a number of CIA insiders began buying the stocks of Francisco and other sugar companies, the earnings of which had been depressed by the loss of Cuban plantations. Stockbrokers became curious about the sudden influx of orders as friends were cut in on the tip that cheap sugar shares might prove a sweet gamble.”

Hooters, a Las Vegas company, charges $57 an hour to have topless women clean your home.